From my reading on the subject industry seems a lot more free in practice than academia. Which is a sad state of affairs in my view. No overbearing need to worry about keeping grant committees happy or paper review boards or tenured advisors or well connected members of the community. If you don't play by the rules in academia then you won't get another position and future grants much less tenure. Large companies will pay for people to do research that is only tangentially relevant to their business. And if your research does make them money then they'll put up with a lot.
You can actually do much of the exact same research at industry labs as at a university. You can even compete for the same government grants. In many fields the highest-cited authors with the most publications actually work in industry.
You will have managers in industry of course, where in academia you just have a dept chair and dean who only have a vague sense of what you're up to. On the other hand, in industry you can actually devote most of your time to doing the research yourself. Often they break the labor up into those that write grants and the team that does the work. Whereas in academia the incentives really drive you to spend all your time dealing with funding sources and students. When you do have free time, you then have a backlog of writing you want to get done.
